"The Law of Affirmative Action provides a comprehensive chronicle of the evolution of the Supreme Court's involvement with the racial affirmative action issues over the last quarter century. Starting with the 1974 DeFunis v. Odegaard decision and the seminal 1978 Bakke decision, which marked the beginnings of the Court's entanglement with affirmative action, Girardeau A. Spann examines every major Supreme Court affirmative action decision, to show how the controversy the Court initially left unresolved in DeFunis has persisted through the Court's 1998-99 term." "Indispensable for students and scholars, this volume elucidates how and why recent years have seen a 180-degree turn in opinion on an issue so central to the debate on race in American today."--Jacket.